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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Semantics (meaning) > Pragmatics
This book provides a compositional, truth-conditional,
crosslinguistic semantics for evidentiality, the linguistic
encoding of the source of information on which a statement is
based. Central to the proposed theory is the distinction between
what propositional content is at-issue and what content is
not-at-issue. Evidentials contribute not-at-issue content, and can
affect the level of commitment a sentence makes to the main
proposition, contributed by sentential mood. In this volume, Sarah
Murray builds on recent work in the formal semantics of evidentials
and related phenomena, and proposes a semantics that does not
appeal to separate dimensions of illocutionary meaning. Instead,
she argues that all sentences make three contributions: at-issue
content, not-at-issue content, and an illocutionary relation.
At-issue content is presented and made available for subsequent
anaphora, but is not directly added to the common ground;
not-at-issue content directly updates the common ground; and the
illocutionary relation uses the at-issue content to impose
structure on the common ground, which, depending on the clause
type, can trigger further updates. The analysis is supported by
extensive empirical data from Cheyenne, drawn from the author's own
fieldwork, as well as from English and a variety of other
languages.
This volume offers an empirical and diachronic investigation of the
foundations and nature of metaphor in English. Metaphor is one of
the hot topics in present-day linguistics, with a huge range of
research focusing on the systematic connections between different
concepts such as heat and anger (fuming, inflamed), sight and
understanding (clear, see), or bodies and landscape (hill-foot,
river-mouth). Until recently, the lack of a comprehensive data
source made it difficult to obtain an overview of this phenomenon
in any language, but this changed with the completion in 2009 of
The Historical Thesaurus of English, the only historical thesaurus
ever produced for any language. Chapters in this volume use this
unique resource as a basis for case studies of semantic domains
including Animals, Colour, Death, Fear, Food, Reading, and Theft,
providing a significant step forward in the data-driven
understanding of metaphor.
This book seeks to bring together the pragmatic theory of 'meaning
as use' with the traditional semantic approach that considers
meaning in terms of truth conditions. Daniel Gutzmann adopts core
ideas by the philosopher David Kaplan in assuming that the meaning
of expressions such as oops or damn can be captured by giving the
conditions under which they can be felicitously used. He develops a
multidimensional approach to meaning, called hybrid semantics, that
incorporates use conditions alongside truth conditions in a unified
framework. This new system overcomes the empirical gaps and
conceptual problems associated with previous multidimensional
systems; it also lessens the burden on the compositional system by
shifting restrictions on the combination of use-conditional
expressions to the lexicon-semantics interface instead of building
them directly into the combinatoric rules. The approach outlined in
this book can capture the entire meaning of complex expressions,
and also has natural applications in the analysis of sentence mood
and modal particles in German, as Gutzmann's two detailed case
studies demonstrate. The book will be a valuable resource for
linguists working in the fields of semantics, pragmatics, and
philosophy of language, as well as to philosophers and cognitive
scientists with an interest in meaning in language.
Yan Huang's highly successful textbook on pragmatics - the study of
language in use - has been fully revised and updated in this second
edition. It includes a brand new chapter on reference, a major
topic in both linguistics and the philosophy of language. Chapters
have also been updated to include new material on upward and
downward entailment, current debates about conversational
implicature, impoliteness, emotional deixis, contextualism versus
semantic minimalism, and the elimination of binding conditions. The
book draws on data from English and a wide range of the world's
languages, and shows how pragmatics is related to the study of
semantics, syntax, and sociolinguistics and to such fields as the
philosophy of language, linguistic anthropology, and artificial
intelligence. Professor Huang includes exercises and essay topics
at the end of each chapter, and offers guidance and suggested
solutions at the end of the volume. Written by one of the leading
scholars in the field, this new edition will continue to be an
ideal textbook for students of linguistics, and a valuable resource
for scholars and students of language in philosophy, psychology,
anthropology, and computer science.
This is the first textbook on Functional Discourse Grammar, a
recently developed theory of language structure which analyses
utterances at four independent levels of grammatical
representation: pragmatic, semantic, morphosyntactic and
phonological. The book offers a very systematic and highly
accessible introduction to the theory: following the top-down
organization of the model, it takes the reader step-by-step though
the various levels of analysis (from pragmatics down to phonology),
while at the same time providing a detailed account of the
interaction between these different levels. The many exercises,
categorized according to degree of difficulty, ensure that students
are challenged to use the theory in a creative manner, and invite
them to test and evaluate the theory by applying it to the new data
in various linguistic contexts. Evelien Keizer uses examples from a
variety of sources to demonstrate how the theory of Functional
Discourse Grammar can be used to analyse and explain the most
important functional and formal features of present-day English.
The book also contains examples from a wide variety of other
typologically diverse languages, making it attractive not only to
students of English linguistics but to anyone interested in
linguistic theory more generally.
This book provides an introduction to compositional semantics and
to the syntax/semantics interface. It is rooted within the
tradition of model theoretic semantics, and develops an explicit
fragment of both the syntax and semantics of a rich portion of
English. Professor Jacobson adopts a Direct Compositionality
approach, whereby the syntax builds the expressions while the
semantics simultaneously assigns each a model-theoretic
interpretation. Alongside this approach, the author also presents a
competing view that makes use of an intermediate level, Logical
Form. She develops parallel treatments of a variety of phenomena
from both points of view with detailed comparisons. The book begins
with simple and fundamental concepts and gradually builds a more
complex fragment, including analyses of more advanced topics such
as focus, negative polarity, and a variety of topics centering on
pronouns and binding more generally. Exercises are provided
throughout, alongside open-ended questions for students to
consider. The exercises are interspersed with the text to promote
self-discovery of the fundamentals and their applications. The book
provides a rigorous foundation in formal analysis and model
theoretic semantics and is suitable for advanced undergraduate and
graduate students in linguistics, philosophy of language, and
related fields.
This book systematically investigates what follows about meaning in
language if current views on the limited, or even redundant, role
of linguistic semantics are taken to their radical conclusion.
Focusing on conditionals, the book defends a wholly pragmatic,
wholly inferential account of meaning - one which foregrounds a
reasoning subject's individual state of mind. The topics discussed
in the book include conceptual content, internalism and
externalism, the semantics-pragmatics distinction, meaning holism
and explicit versus implicit communication. These topics and the
author's analysis of conditionals will allow the reader to engage
with some traditional and current research in linguistics,
philosophy and psychology.
How is it that words come to stand for the things they stand for?
Is the thing that a word stands for - its reference - fully
identified or described by conventions known to the users of the
word? Or is there a more roundabout relation between the reference
of a word and the conventions that determine or fix it? Do words
like 'water', 'three', and 'red' refer to appropriate things, just
as the word 'Aristotle' refers to Aristotle? If so, which things
are these, and how do they come to be referred to by those words?
In Roads to Reference, Mario Gomez-Torrente provides novel answers
to these and other questions that have been of traditional interest
in the theory of reference. The book introduces a number of cases
of apparent indeterminacy of reference for proper names,
demonstratives, and natural kind terms, which suggest that
reference-fixing conventions for them adopt the form of lists of
merely sufficient conditions for reference and reference failure.
He then provides arguments for a new anti-descriptivist picture of
those kinds of words, according to which the reference-fixing
conventions for them do not describe their reference. This book
also defends realist and objectivist accounts of the reference of
ordinary natural kind nouns, numerals, and adjectives for sensible
qualities. According to these accounts these words refer,
respectively, to 'ordinary kinds', cardinality properties, and
properties of membership in intervals of sensible dimensions, and
these things are fixed in subtle ways by associated
reference-fixing conventions.
This book addresses different linguistic and philosophical aspects
of referring to the self in a wide range of languages from
different language families, including Amharic, English, French,
Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Newari (Sino-Tibetan), Polish, Tariana
(Arawak), and Thai. In the domain of speaking about oneself,
languages use a myriad of expressions that cut across grammatical
and semantic categories, as well as a wide variety of
constructions. Languages of Southeast and East Asia famously employ
a great number of terms for first person reference to signal
honorification. The number and mixed properties of these terms make
them debatable candidates for pronounhood, with many grammar-driven
classifications opting to classify them with nouns. Some languages
make use of egophors or logophors, and many exhibit an interaction
between expressing the self and expressing evidentiality qua the
epistemic status of information held from the ego perspective. The
volume's focus on expressing the self, however, is not directly
motivated by an interest in the grammar or lexicon, but instead
stems from philosophical discussions on the special status of
thoughts about oneself, known as de se thoughts. It is this
interdisciplinary understanding of expressing the self that
underlies this volume, comprising philosophy of mind at one end of
the spectrum and cross-cultural pragmatics of self-expression at
the other. This unprecedented juxtaposition results in a novel
method of approaching de se and de se expressions, in which
research methods from linguistics and philosophy inform each other.
The importance of this interdisciplinary perspective on expressing
the self cannot be overemphasized. Crucially, the volume also
demonstrates that linguistic research on first-person reference
makes a valuable contribution to research on the self tout court,
by exploring the ways in which the self is expressed, and thereby
adding to the insights gained through philosophy, psychology, and
cognitive science.
Wylie Breckenridge offers a fresh understanding of the character of
visual experience by deploying the methods of semantics. He
develops a theory of what we mean by the 'look' sentences that we
use to describe the character of our visual experiences, and on
that basis develops a theory of what it is to have a visual
experience with a certain character. The result is a new and
stronger defence of a neglected view, the adverbial theory of
perception.
This book is an introduction to the relationship between the
morphosyntactic properties of sentences and their associated
illocutionary forces or force potentials. The volume begins with
several chapters dedicated to important theoretical and
methodological issues, such as sentence and utterance meaning,
illocutionary force, clause types, and cross-linguistic comparison.
The bulk of the book is then composed of chapter-length case
studies that systematically investigate typologically prominent
clause types and their forces, such as declaratives and assertions,
interrogatives and questions, and imperatives and commands. These
case studies begin with an overview of the necessary theoretical
foundations, followed by a discussion of the grammatical structures
of English, and an assessment of the relevant cross-linguistic
facts. Each chapter ends with a succinct summary of the most
important findings, practice exercises, and recommendations for
further reading and research. Overall, the book works towards
developing a gradient model of clause types that goes substantially
beyond the traditional distinction between major and minor clause
types. It draws on insights from linguistics, philosophy, and
sociology, and may be used as a textbook for undergraduate or
graduate courses in semantics, pragmatics, and morphosyntax.
Im alltaglichen Sprachgebrauch werden Somatismen, d.h.
Phraseologismen, die ein Koerperteil als Komponente beinhalten,
besonders in der gesprochenen Sprache verwendet. Die
UEbersetzbarkeit dieser formelhaften Konstituenten ist aufgrund
ihrer komplexen lexikalischen und semantischen Zusammensetzung
sowie der soziokulturellen Unterschiede bisweilen problematisch.
UEbersetzer und Sprachlehrer sehen sich immer wieder vor die
Herausforderung gestellt, in der Zielsprache nach einer moeglichen
AEquivalenz suchen zu mussen. Das vorliegende Woerterbuch, in dem
die deutschen somatischen Redewendungen mit ihren synonymen
turkischen Entsprechungen in Gruppen gegliedert sind, kann als
Hilfsmittel bei der ubersetzerischen Tatigkeit verwendet werden und
eignet sich fur den Fremdsprachenunterricht.
Das Buch vereinigt 15 Beitrage zur historischen Valenzforschung.
Die Autoren dokumentieren den gegenwartigen Stand der Forschung und
unterstutzen zugleich Bestrebungen fur ein Woerterbuch, das die
Entwicklung der Valenz deutscher Verben im UEberblick beschreibt.
Dazu wird die grundlegende Korpusfrage diskutiert. Ferner eroertern
die Autoren an ausgewahlten Beispielen, wie die Verbumgebung im
Satz auf den historischen deutschen Sprachstufen festzustellen ist.
Neu sind Beitrage, die sich mit dem Verhaltnis von historischer
Valenz und Konstruktionsgrammatik auseinandersetzen.
Das Buch untersucht die Semantik der Substantivkomposita des
Mittelhochdeutschen. Grundlage ist das Korpus des Projekts
"Mittelhochdeutsche Grammatik" von Th. Klein, K.-P. Wegera und
H.-J. Solms. Der Autor bestimmt die aktuellen Bedeutungen der
Belege in ihrem jeweiligen UEberlieferungskontext, der moeglichst
vollstandig mitgeteilt wird. Vor diesem Hintergrund werden die
Wortbildungsbedeutungen der einzelnen Woerter angesetzt, die
wiederum Grundlage der anschliessenden semantischen Klassifizierung
der Komposita sind. Das Bindungsverhaltnis zwischen Grundwort und
Bestimmungswort wird nach einem bereits fur die Gegenwartssprache
erprobten Raster ermittelt.
Die Studien greifen den Widerspruch zwischen der bestandigen
Prasenz von Schrifttexten im Alltag und deren mangelnder
empirischer textlinguistisch-stilistischer Bearbeitung auf. Der
Kommunikationsbereich Alltag ist uber seine soziokulturelle und
historische Wesenheit charakterisiert, deshalb fokussieren die
Beitrage innerhalb eines kommunikationsorientierten Ansatzes
synchronische, diachronische, interkulturelle und
produktiv-rezeptive Aspekte ausgewahlter Schrifttexte. Aufgrund der
Unabgeschlossenheit dieses Kommunikationsbereichs, seiner
UEberschneidungen und Vernetzungen mit anderen
Kommunikationsbereichen sind keine prototypischen Schrifttextsorten
des Alltags inferierbar. Es wird gezeigt, dass es bezuglich
einzelner Textsorten Zuordnungen von Formulierungsweisen gibt, dass
jedoch das Ausloten von Polaritaten, wie Privatheit - Offizialitat,
Usualitat - Kreativitat, Normbefolgung - Saloppheit, eine gangige
kommunikative Praxis darstellt. Die Besonderheit des Bandes besteht
darin, dass ein Ausschnitt schriftlicher Alltagskommunikation sowie
deren sozio-kulturell-historische Determination starker in den
Fokus empirisch-linguistischen Interesses geruckt werden.
This volume explores the linguistic expression of modality in
natural language from a cross-linguistic perspective. Modal
expressions provide the basic tools that allow us to dissociate
what we say from what is actually going on, allowing us to talk
about what might happen or might have happened, as well as what is
required, desirable, or permitted. Chapters in the book demonstrate
that modality involves many more syntactic categories and levels of
syntactic structure than traditionally assumed. The volume
distinguishes between three types of modality: 'low modality',
which concerns modal interpretations associated with the verbal and
nominal cartographies in syntax; 'middle modality', or modal
interpretation associated with the syntactic cartography internal
to the clause; and 'high modality', relating to the left periphery.
It combines cross-linguistic discussions of the more widely studied
sources of modality with analyses of novel or unexpected sources,
and shows how the meanings associated with the three types of
modality are realized across a wide range of languages.
Das Buch eroertert die Verbalisierungsschwierigkeiten von
olfaktorischen Wahrnehmungen. Hierfur betrachtet der Autor zunachst
die Olfaktorik aus kulturell-philosophischer, neurophysiologischer
und anthropolinguistischer Perspektive. Des Weiteren legt er dar,
wie man uber Geruche im Deutschen und Polnischen spricht. Er geht
auf zweierlei Art und Weise vor. Zunachst erfolgen anhand von
Woerterbuchern Analyse und Vergleich des deutschen und polnischen
Geruchswortschatzes auf der synchronen und diachronen Ebene.
Anschliessend zeigt der Autor mithilfe von sprachlichen Korpora und
unter Anwendung der kognitiv-linguistischen Methodologie
(Frame-Semantik, konzeptuelle Metapher) auf, wie heute Geruche im
Deutschen und Polnischen verbalisiert und konzeptualisiert werden.
Die in diesem Band vereinigten Beitrage nehmen Bezug auf
Forschungsgegenstande der Germanistik und angewandten
Sprachwissenschaft, insbesondere der Morphologie, Syntax,
Phraseologie, der Text- und Diskurslinguistik sowie der
Translations- und Literaturwissenschaft. Die Autorinnen und Autoren
wurdigen mit ihren Beitragen die wissenschaftlichen Leistungen der
polnischen Germanistin und ehemaligen Prasidentin des Verbandes
Polnischer Germanisten Zofia Berdychowska, Professorin an der
Jagiellonen-Universitat Krakow. Die Publikation erscheint
anlasslich ihres 65. Geburtstages im Jahr 2016.
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